Web to text to speech to CD to my mother

My mother is blind. This is a source of great frustration to her, because despite her age and her disability, her mind is as sharp and energetic as ever. She listens to the radio, and books on tape/CD, and subscribes to various audio journals; however, in many cases the only feasible approach is to ask someone to read to her. This is time-consuming and frequently inconvenient, and because she feels it to be an imposition my mother often decides not to ask.

Today we were talking on the phone, and she mentioned that she’d been listening to a piece from the New York Review of Books by Thomas Powers in which he reviewed four books about J. Robert Oppenheimer. Someone (my brother, I think) was reading it to her, but it’s a long piece, so he was doing it in several sessions.

After I got off the phone, I decided that there had to be a better way. First I bought a copy of iSpeak It and installed it on my PowerBook. I gave it the URL to the Thomas Powers article, waited while it downloaded the piece, edited the text a bit to clean up extraneous navigation links and so forth, and instructed iSpeak It to transfer it to iTunes. A few minutes later I had a 55 minute AAC track in my iTunes library containing the article in OS X’s Bruce voice. The quality is not wonderful, but it’s quite recognizable. I burned a CD-R, and tomorrow I’ll mail it to her in England.

It’s no great chore to do this for my mother once or twice a month, but I wish there were a more straightforward solution. Of course I could set her up with a DSL connection, buy her a Mac mini, and set up a few Automator scripts for her, but I’ve tried similar approaches in the past without success. What I want is a big USB-connected control unit with a dozen big keys with glyphs that can easily be recognized by feel, and yellow on black for maximum contrast….

No names, no pack-drill

[Company policy, and contractual obligations, mean that I have to conceal a few details. Never mind – the message will be clear.]

I’ve always thought that, next to banking, the most mature kind of applications software was in airline ticketing. Like many of you, I’ve visited airline websites and seen the fare for a particular flight change from minute to minute , often quite dramatically. I’ve read about the principles of “yield management”, and the anecdotes of how one passenger winds up paying a thousand dollars more than another in the same class on the same flight. And I’ve seen the commercials for the various companies that promise to find you the cheapest flights, hotels, cars, and so forth. Clearly there’s some powerful software at work here: indeed were it not for the fact that “Artificial Intelligence” has come to mean “that which we don’t know how to do yet”, this would seem to qualify.

And yet…

Hard on the heels of my recent trip to Colorado, I now have to visit California for a week. I prepared a budgetary estimate, filled out a travel request, received an authorization number, and sat down to book the travel. (Those of you still living in the 1980’s might imagine that my admin or secretary would do this. You can go back to sleep now.) Like most large companies, Sun has contracted with a Large Travel Service Company That Cannot Be Named so that employees can book their own travel through an exquisitely-customized on-line portal.

I logged in, and selected the page for travel planning. (Jakob Nielsen would love this page; it violates almost all of his design guidelines.) I entered the dates of my outbound and return travel, as well as the origin and destination airports. The system offers two ways of planning air travel: choosing each flight individually, or configuring complete round-trip itineraries. I knew that whatever I did the system would follow up by attempting to find a cheaper alternative, so I asked for complete itineraries, sorted by price.

After thinking about it for nearly a minute, the system offered me several choices. Oddly, the cheapest of these wasn’t a particularly good fit with my chosen travel times, and it was several hundred dollars more than what I’ve paid for my last few trips from BOS to SFO. (This also meant that it was well above the budgetary estimate that I’d provided. Oops.) I backtracked to the flight search page, and tried searching for individual flights. I found a pair of flights that looked like the cheapest (though you can’t tell for sure until you’ve chosen), and was $50 less than I’d budgeted. Bingo! But wait! “Your choice violates policy: a cheaper alternative was not chosen.” But the [expletive deleted] system refused to tell me what the cheaper alternative might be!!. After trying several times to guess what might make it happy (without once finding a cheaper combination), I chose an override option and completed my itinerary. I’m not going to go into the “Fatal resource error” during my hotel search; let’s just say that the whole procedure took me nearly an hour, including substantial duplicate data entry.

So to my divisional controller: if I spent a couple of dollars more than I should on the flight, I’m sorry. I’d love to know how I could have done better, though if you factor in the cost of my time…. And to the Large Travel Service Company That Cannot Be Named: evolve or die. Outsourcing complexity to patients and providers may be an odious but winning strategy for managed care companies, but a travel agent can be replaced in a mouse-click. As for whether this violates any blogging policy, I can’t imagine that it does. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this kind of thing affects every large company. As Jonathan has discussed in his blog, the best measure of quality is the customer recommendation index. It’s worth remembering that this applies to our suppliers as well.

And as for the trip itself, I’m going to be travelling on an airline that I’ve never used before! But that’s the subject of another blog entry. Now, has anyone got any cheap A.I. software that they want to unload?

A profound sense of loss

Herewith the nostalgic observations of my colleague Robin Wilton on listening to Bill Clinton on the BBC: “This morning I heard a snippet of an interview with Bill Clinton; he was lucid, intelligent and persuasive. Some of his sentences had several linked clauses. He used words like ‘profound’, ‘disproportionately’ and ‘dislocation’, and used them correctly. He coherently related the grim after-effects of Hurricane Katrina to the global geo-political issues of the day.”

(I also listened to Clinton: it was an excellent interview. I strongly recommend that you check out the streaming audio/video version.)

During the last presidential election campaign, there was at least one documentary that presented film clips of Bush campaigning for his father and giving coherent speeches which demonstrated a modicum of rhetorical skill. It was suggested that the folksy, semi-dyslexic style that he adopted as Governor of Texas and subsequently was therefore likely to be a mere facade, an act to appeal to voters distrustful of “smart-aleck politicians”. The implication was that Bush was smarter than he sounded.

But Bush isn’t running for anything now, and even members of his own party are turning on him. If he were capable of giving a speech of the calibre of Clinton, now would be a good time to do it. Maybe it’s alcohol, maybe psychoactive medication, or even too many diet sodas. Whatever the reason, the conclusion is inescapable that today Bush is, quite simply, what he appears: a venal, cunning, opportunistic, but ultimately rather stupid man, incapable of reasoning from B to C, let alone describing A, B and C in well-turned sentences.

And I really miss Clinton. He had his faults, but they didn’t include stupidity and incompetence. Competence would be nice right now.

Status update

Sitting in a crowded 757 on the taxiway at DEN, with a screaming baby behind me, and a 90 minute ground stop before we can take off for Boston. And to cap it all, the captain refuses to turn on Channel 9. At least I can use my Treo to rearrange things by phone and email… and blog. Sigh.

Back to Boston

After 10 days in Colorado, I’m heading back to Boston today. I went through the on-line check-in just to see if United would offer me an upgrade. They did, but since the only upgrade seats were middles, I decided to stick with my cattle-class window.

I hope this particular flight won’t be delayed, since I’m due to host a conference call just 55 minutes after we land. I have visions of standing around in the baggage claim area waiting for my stuff, while hosting a call on my cell-phone….

Ah, well: time to pack.

Starting conversations

Today we had our “geek-to-geek” meeting at StorageTek’s Louisville, CO campus. Originally I’d planned to hold a brief and informal get-together for a few senior engineers; instead it evolved into a full-blown day-long colloquium involving more than 50 engineers (and two lawyers). Not all are in the picture; a few were slow getting back from lunch, and one was balanced on an SUV taking this photo! Starting conversations Of those attending, about a third were from Sun and two-thirds from StorageTek.

The schedule was tight: an hour and a half for a series of brief introductory presentations; a break followed by a lively Q&A session; lunch (of course); then break-outs from 1pm to 5pm. There were ten hour-long break-out sessions on topics ranging from product processes to storage virtualization. Amazingly, we stayed on schedule, for which kudos to the speakers. Obviously the presentations and break-out sessions weren’t long enough to dive really deep into specific technical and business issues, but that was never the intent. The point of this meeting was simply to make connections and start conversations, and in this I believe we succeeded. The next step is to broaden the participation and link the discussions to the organizational and product planning processes. The work is just beginning….

Anyway, my thanks to all those who participated, especially to those who made particular travel-related sacrifices to attend, and to my colleague Richard for handling the facilities. I owe you guys.

P.S. Over dinner after the meeting, I was talking for a long-time StorageTek employee, and I mentioned that I was planning to blog about the events of the day. We discussed the fact that StorageTek, like many (?most) companies, had a tradition of secrecy, even over minor matters. For some, Sun’s open style – “living life in public” – is likely to be a culture shock. So this evening after I’d drafted this blog entry I applied my usual test with more care than usual: Should I be concerned that a malevolent marketing type from HP might read my blog and use the contents to disparage Sun to our customers or anyone else? I don’t think so.

Partying, networking

Yesterday was the first of two big days in the Sun+StorageTek integration work I’m doing here in Colorado. First, we gathered most of the employees at StorageTek’s Louisville facility and Sun’s Broomfield campus in the courtyard at Broomfield for executive speeches, food, music (too loud, but never mind), networking, and celebration. That was from 10 to 12. Then in the afternoon we had a couple of “geek to geek” sessions on file systems and the application of crypto techniques to storage. The second of these ran until about 8; I brought in some food and beer to help the discussions. (The beer caused some confusion: Sun and StorageTek policies are different. But we’re all Sun now.)

Today we’re having an all day colloquium with around 75-80 55 participants, drawn from all over Sun. We’ll have a morning plenary session, with break-outs this afternoon. I’m looking forward to this: the energy levels and enthusiasm seem to be really high. More anon (perhaps with pictures – another policy issue to resolve).

Calling all StorageTek bloggers

If you work at StorageTek and you’re a blogger, or if you know of colleagues who blog, please add a comment to this posting or drop me an email. If you’ve been a stealth blogger, or if you’re concerned about Sun’s attitude towards blogging, please check out the policies on public discourse and privacy. You don’t have to host your blog at blogs.sun.com to be a part of the Sun blogging community: many of us maintain our independent blogs and make them available for aggregation via RSS.

England wins the Ashes

Pietersen reaches his centurypietersen.jpg on the way to a total of 158, as England draw the Fifth Test and thereby win the Ashes for the first time since 1987! According to reports, England has gone cricket crazy; one writer compared it with the Red Sox winning the World Series last year. (I’m not going to risk commenting on that!) Anyway, congratulations to both teams. (I wonder if the BBC will release a “highlights” DVD that will play on Region 1 players.)